Space and tech billionaire Elon Musk has increasingly used his social media platform X to amplify commentary on race with a noticeable rise in posts focusing on concerns about White identity, discrimination and what he frames as threats to “Whiteness.”
According to the analysis by The Washington Post, which reviewed 65,918 posts from Musk’s X account between January 2023 and mid-April this year, discussions related to race have sharply increased in recent months.
In the past seven months alone, around 6 per cent of Musk’s posts (roughly 850 in total) have focused on race. This is nearly three times higher than the rate seen in the previous two years. More than half his posts included references to “white” or “Whites”, the analysis revealed.
The data further shows that Musk has been posting about race almost daily, in 166 out of 197 days, from October through mid-April.
In January, he shared a post that read, “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” while in another post in the following month, he wrote that there has been “unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more.”
Beyond these claims, Musk has also weighed in on a wider set of race-related and policy debates such as hiring practices, mentions of how White people eradicated slavery and allegations that public figures as well as rival AI systems display bias against White and Asian individuals.
He has also repeatedly commented on South Africa’s political and social landscape where he argued that White communities face discrimination in the post-apartheid period.
These increasingly pointed remarks have raised concern among some observers and critics. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the outlet Musk’s rhetoric aligns closely “with standard talking points of white supremacy,”
“You just don’t get more white supremacist than the stuff Musk is signing onto or pushing,” Beirich added.
At the same time, Musk’s focus on race has also drawn criticism from some of his former supporters who argue that it distracts from his business priorities and leadership responsibilities across companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.
But public opinion data paints a different picture. A Pew Research Center study from last year shows that only 12 per cent of Americans feel White people experience “a lot” of discrimination which is the lowest among all racial and ethnic groups included in the survey.
At the same time, a Gallup survey found that 59 per cent of Americans believe racial minorities still do not have the same job opportunities as White Americans.